This chapter deals with the attempt to understand African political societies in a coherent way. To an extent, such an understanding is difficult, if not impossible, because of the formation of the modern Africa political body. The developmentalists of the 1960s used to stress the idea of ethnicity and its journalistic equivalent, tribalism. They constructed the State out of the horizontal integration of heterogeneous communities that the European powers had had regrouped with arbitrary territorial boundaries. Marxist anthropologists, not immune to the attraction of an ethnic explanation developed their own explanation. Two sides of the coin were shown, one hold forth Africa’s transition from primitivism to the situation of modern State, the other of the indigenous representatives who wished to further the aims of national integration. Still the decoding of sub-Saharan State trajectories in terms of tribalism persists, describing incontestable realities while making them practically incomprehensible.
